skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is computer equipment really where companies are spending money? A $100 keyboard is nothing compared to a $95 million write-off on a failed company you bought.

(We have self-service supply cabinets at Google for things like laptop chargers or cables. The sign on the cabinet says "don't be evil" and I think most people treat it that way.

A recent change is that laptop chargers no longer come in boxes, so you can just return yours to the bin if you don't need it anymore and it will look the same as the "new" ones. Clever!)
The beautiful part of this is that this isn't just a spoof about "things that tend pop up on the HN front page." I'm pretty sure they took the front page at one point in time and turned it into satire post by post, perhaps injecting a couple stereotypical links after the fact.
Why sell short instead of buying put options?
in Toronto area you can get senior dev position fairly easy in range 95k - 110k and I can tell you from personal experience it is very hard to find decent developer (just decent would make us happy) , usually is 1 of 20 interviews if we are lucky
Interesting, good luck.
Unfortunately, you can't use "in:", "is:", "label:", or "has:star" in filters. Filters are applied before these things are determined. If you try to, you get the following message from GMail:

Filter searches containing "label:", "in:", "is:", or stars criteria (i.e. "has:yellow-star") are not recommended as they will never match incoming mail. Do you still wish to continue to the next step?
Actually, when it comes to sales across borders, "Not for Resale Outside of [X country or region" has legal effect in every country that respects copyright.

First-sale doctrine is a uniquely American idea; it only applies to (first) sales subject to the jurisdiction of American courts. I.e., it would apply to a sale by Amazon to some dude in Japan and to a sale by Amazon JP to some guy in California, but not to a sale by Amazon KOR to some guy in China, who then resells into the U.S.
Process-agnostic (So it can be carried into any organization's culture) nuts-and-bolts approach to designing, building, and testing software. Not open book, and not 100% multiple choice. Require actual code to be written from scratch, in addition to an existing systems to be "maintained" by applying a security fix, adding a feature, or put under test.
It looks like it was yesterday's front page.
Numbers for an iTunes single: Best case is generally an indie artist who has a 50/50 split with their label. So for an iTunes single, the label gets at most $0.70 (and if they use an aggregator then say $0.63). Divide by two and you are at $0.32-0.35/track. So basically you need to divide all of your equivalence numbers by 3. Instead of 300 plays, it's one hundred plays. 3 times a day for ~30 days or once a day for one hundred days.
If you know the right people it can be that easy, I agree. However for someone with no experience and no connections in the industry this would be hard.
Why You Don’t Drive an Electric Car (But Might Soon)
Gold does have value: as an industrial commodity for coating electrical contacts and for IC wire bonding, among other uses. Its elemental characteristics are unique. This value is probably much lower than its present market value though.
Amusingly accurate, but you forgot to include an article about the US Patent system, and a few Marco/Daring Fireball/etc articles on the latest event or rumor in Apple Land. Oh, and those Elon Musk and Tim Cook articles could use a few more zeroes tacked to the end of their comment counts.

While we're at it, a parody of the average HN comment thread would have to include:

When will people get the message about grey text on light backgrounds?

WHY DID THE MODS CHANGE THE TITLE IT WAS PERFECTLY DESCRIPTIVE BEFORE AND NOW
IT ISN'T
Separate comment thread discussing Stack Overflow's moderation.

Helpful link to Wikipedia article explaining some concept explicitly mentioned
in story or parent comment.

Is this site down for anyone else?
viewtext.org mirror

Does not work in my browser.

jbigglesworth48, I just wanted to let you know, you've been hellbanned.

Ugh, Flash video/bootstrap/touch gestures?

Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Tim Cook
Steve Jobs
Can we stop talking about Steve Jobs already? I mean, he did XYZ but he
wasn't exactly Q.
Steve Jobs
How is this even relevant to the story?
Steve Jobs

I don't mean to be pedantic, but you made a spelling or grammatical error.
Well, actually...

This story is *Not HN Worthy*, any Freshman CS student should have learned
this within seconds of stepping into his first lecture.
Actually, there are a lot of non-programmer HN readers who are interested in
this, you need to check your programmer/college educated/computer loving/
first world/middle class/white/male/young/old privilege.

Insightful and relevant comment containing a subtle joke.
Please excuse me while I completely misunderstand this joke and write a
fervent argument against something the author never argued.
Please excuse me while I explain the joke in excruciating detail.
I think the author meant X.
It was a joke.
I think the author was joking.
I should know better, but I'm going to argue with you anyways.
Guy who didn't get the joke here, I saw your comment before the ones
explaining the joke, let's have a giant flamewar.
I don't get this joke. Can someone explain?
Another excruciatingly detailed explanation of the joke.
Zero responses to the actual comment.

This comment is *what's Wrong with HN*

Recent Apple decision is bad, and I am saying this *as a guy who owns
APPLE_PRODUCT*

EDIT: How could I forget:

I didn't actually read the article, but I'm going to start arguing about what
I *thought* the article was about, based on the title.

EDIT: Why am I being downvoted?

and of course, my personal favorite:

Ok, go ahead and downvote, me, assholes, see what I care!
> When Google+ came out I was blown away by just how well designed it was, but then slowly Google ruined it. Andy Hertzfeld created an amazing product, but then Google worked their "magic" just like they did with Blogger and watered down every strong feature like circles.

How have they ruined circles? They work the same as they did on day one as far as I can tell.

> In fact Google goes out of its way to not have to interface with people: Have a problem with a Google product? Well good luck if you want to talk to a human.

Let's not confuse two separate issues. Social IQ has no relevance to their customer support. Their customer support is non-existant for free products because doing support at their scale is nearly impossible. And while I'm not familiar with their support for paid products overall, I've had a decent experience dealing with Play support when I purchased my Nexus 7. Anyways, point being that the engineers were never going to be customer support in the first place.

> And if you want to see their latest failure just try using their mobile app: When put next to Facebook it's terrible, and when put next to Instagram (now owned by facebook) it looks like student project.

First off: which platform? Because on Android, G+ far outstrips Facebook's generally terrible mobile app. I've also seen some pretty positive reviews of the iOS app, but I have no direct experience with it.
Instagram's second year: over 100 million users & 5 billion photos
Does Facebook offer extensive human tech support?
I was disappointed a few of those didn't actually click to articles.
People on HN seem to be misunderstanding the purpose of this exam. This exam is not for web programmers, or game programmers, or any "startup"-type programmers. If what you do can be done iteratively without much problem, this exam is not for you.

This exam is for people who work on very difficult, very error-sensitive, very high-end stuff that needs to work from the very start: jet planes, medical devices, spacevessel systems, etc. You don't get second chances with these types of systems, so this exam is focused on making sure passers know the gold standard for how coding is currently done in these areas.
How would this affect your right to give stuff away?

For example, say I bought a car with copyrighted software or logos or whatever in it. Due to this court ruling on the first sale doctrine, and EULA saying my license was nontransferable, I wouldn't be able to sell or give it to anyone else without the copyright holder's permission.

Say I couldn't obtain that permission -- I didn't have enough money, or they went out of business and nobody was sure who owned the copyright, or it was simply too complicated for an ordinary person to figure out who owns all the copyrights to the firmware in all the different microcontrollers -- radio, engine, steering, antilock brakes, etc. EDIT: Or maybe the copyright holder simply refused, saying "the rights are not for sale at any price" or saying "one TRILLION dollars."

Does that then mean that I can't sell the car or give it away either? That I have to leave it rusting in my yard forever when it stops working, I can't even give it to a wrecker?

EDIT: Also, any local or state laws against leaving cars to rust in your yard are now null and void, since getting rid of such cars would require people to violate federal copyright law. (When there's a conflict like this, I'm pretty sure the Constitution says federal law wins.)
Oh, I guess we differ on definition of "edit". You can edit the files and it's still really useful (http://play.golang.org is an example).

I mean, you're right in that it can't write to the FS, but that's a HTML limitation... you juts need a shim in webkit container to do this, or you could use filepicker.io or similar techniques.
Yes, because we have too many engineers. It's so hard to choose a good developer from the hundreds of applicants for each job so we need a 10 year old obsolete test to filter the good ones out. Talk about waste of money, this is something I hope is not paid by tax dollars...
Declassified at Last: Air Force’s Supersonic Flying Saucer Schematics
That's not the point. You have a finite amount of time in an interview, so why on earth would you ask a question regarding a meaningless skill that the candidate will use maybe once in their entire time at the company when you can ask something that, you know, might actually tell you if they're a good programmer or not.
The solution: break your task into smaller chunks (< 1 day). Then estimate for the week, max. "At the end of the week, X will be done.". After then, scope will be more clear for the tasks following...

PS: I've noticed that code gets estimated too low in general, but anything involving manual (repetitious) work gets estimated way too high.
11. Twitter is down (2010)
67 points by retrothrowback 6 hours ago | flag | 140 short comments

Clever.
UI Search Engine
I don't mean to justify Apple's policies with regards to Foxconn, but Apple delivers its products on time, on a massive scale. Contrast this with Lenovo, who released a Macbook Air copycat in August, the X1 Carbon. I ordered it as soon as it came out, and it still has not shipped.
You're only considering economic value from the point of view of the original creator. Shops that resell things derive economic value from the sale of the used goods. They provide the service of consolidating and coalating these goods into a single place (and repairing them from a broken state in other cases).
Nobody? Anyone who uses WebEx would disagree with you.
I'm not going to try to persuade you that a hateful slur is offensive, even when it's not being used about people.

"Bob is so gay" == offensive

"That chair is so gay" == probably still offensive

I'm happy to agree to disagree. You don't think your use of the word is offensive - that's fine. But you don't get to tell me what I (or others) find offensive, and many people find any use of the word retarded offensive.

Perhaps it's a generational thing. Are you young? (Less than 35?)
And "Maintenance" is only 7.5%!
Human Flesh Search, aka distributed vigilantisim
I've read a lot of these, and this one is by far the best. It makes sense and is drawn from actual experience. Its concise and practical, yet covers so many topics. Highly recommended. It should be a book!
Two startup ideas: goal-oriented travel search & luxury travel search
Foxconn denied the report this morning. This article is referencing a release from yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/foxconn-denies-re...
It's not a loss center per se, but profligate treatment of company resources, to an extent, reflects poorly on other aspects of the business.

The best programmers I have had the pleasure of working with maintained a very orderly desk and were very disciplined with use of resources in real life. Interestingly enough, you could gleam that from the style of their codes.
But if you're doing it legitimately, and not bulk emailing, EC2 has proper SMTP forwarders you can use. And if you ARE bulk emailing, they have a service (plus you're not using Gmail for that anyway).
If you're going to consider that the author "looses" a sale because of a resold, used physical book (which was the original subject, not ebooks), then you should factor in the losses due to not allowing resales at all
- because such books are much riskier investments and are less likely to be bought in the first place, especially if they are technical books with non-trivial prices. I've convinced myself to buy many a book because I knew I could resell them easily and legally if I didn't like them.
Well, maybe. If you can put paint on a paintbrush and transfer it to a canvas, are you suddenly a "painter", or just a guy with Cadmium Yellow smeared on his shirt?
Music Player That Discovers Structure and Rhythm in Songs
Has Twitter ever had a vision? Their product direction seems to have been largely based on cribbing what users and third party clients come up with.
Well, if you use incognito mode, you can do this. Doesn't scale past n=2 but helpful for many use cases.
You omitted my fav hn cliche:

"This."
Contrary to popular belief, HN does not have an informal "no humor" policy; HN has an informal "no cheap humor" policy. We (if I may presume to speak for the general community) don't want links to meme images or cheap recitations of popular quotes from TV or movies or something, but if you put some work into it to good result, it's great. Be not ashamed. This was pretty funny at several points. I especially enjoyed the adjectives on the comment counts.
You end up paying extra to buy put options (because of the implied time component -- "theta"). To see the phenomenon, look at the in-the-money put prices and compare them to the current value (if they were exercised today).

If the borrow costs are incredibly low, its much cheaper to hold onto a short position for a month or two than it is to buy long-dated puts.

The other advantage is that its easier to take profits sooner. The bid/ask spread is much larger on the options than on the equity.

Finally, notice how the options have .50 cent increments. When dealing with the equity directly, you can capture as small as a cent profit.
1. Circles: They did a redesign at one point where you can browse specific circles by clicking on well hidden buttons buttons at the top. Of course the buttons don't stay there, so you have to keep clicking. Facebook displays everything on the left nav so it's easy to see their version of circles — and having wasted too much time on both sites i can tell you that in terms of functionality (not ascetics) Facebook wins.

2. "Their customer support is non-existant" This works great for search, but not for every other product they offer. Also it's not great if you're a professional who is using a product. But what kills me is if you are a top brand they do the hand holding, but if you're not in that league well good luck with that! So this sort of blindness reflects a low social IQ. I'll grant you that they aren't the only ones guilty of this, and in fact maybe amazon first invented this approach (but they've learned and have purchased companies like zappos that get it).

3. I'm on iOS looking at my iPhone and the Facebook app is better than G+: Of course Instagram blows them both away. If you forced me to hand out grades it would be: G+ with a C-, Facebook with a B- to B and Instagram with a A. Of course Instagram was designed to be mobile so maybe they cheated? Now I'll grant you that the G+ app looks the most pretty, but it's a pain to use.

But keep in mind I'm ranting because how much I loved the original G+ — if they had a wayback machine setting all would be forgiven.
For most of the article, I was wondering how the author could avoid using the words "vigilante" or "vigilantism". It did show up near the end, in quotes, sounding like a positive thing.

It does sound from this article like flesh searches are for comparatively noble causes; but as with any case where vigilante justice is glorified, I have to wonder what proportion of the victims of vigilantism really "had it coming". (To be fair, in a part of the world where rule of law is rather more tenuous, I think there is somewhat more place for such things... but it's a double-edged sword, and the back edge is very sharp.)
One could easily think so, but it's not quite true.

While x86 processors have relied on caching the instructions for some two decades now the overhead of decoding the VM bytecode instruction bitstream of the VM is certainly too high(especially if it's compressed) to outweigh the possibly reduced stalls due to instruction cache miss because of greater code density.

Of course, one could translate the VM bytecode bitstream to equivalent x86 code upon running, but without some really smart heuristic optimizer there wouldn't be much to gain in speed over simple x86 implementation, although it'd very probably be faster than the VM.
Show HN: Simple Hacker News; never miss an unread submission again
New TV Campaign Launched for WiO 2nd Screen App
We have launched a TV campaign nationwide to highlight our WiO 2nd Screen app. The WiO App now available in the iTunes App Store which features audio content recognition, speech recognition and geo-targeting technologies to interact with TV advertising.

For more information about the campaign, see:

https://www.wioffer.com/wio/press/launch_10-01-12.htm

WiO’s core audio content recognition (ACR) technology allows WiO app users to listen to TV and radio commercials. “But unlike potential competitors in the 2nd Screen space, we have also included a powerful ‘WiO Voice Search’ capability using Nuance Communication’s Dragon voice recognition technology, which allows the user to simply speak the name of the brand, or product, or category in order to receive that advertiser’s ad.” Mr. Greene adds “this is a major enhancement to the 2nd Screen experience that we believe will expand consumer adoption and usage of 2nd Screen media generally, and with WiO’s advertiser clients, specifically.”
I inadvertently created an email black hole. MY STOMACH WAS IN KNOTS.
The title is misleading. Every story has a complaint about the title not conveying enough information, thereby forcing the reader to RTFA (or at least click on the link).
> Yeah, not a big waterfall (or agile, or any other pyramid scheme) fan myself, but this kind of bullshit did get a man on the Moon...

Agreed on the pyramid scheme. But the challenges listed strike me as mostly hardware, physics, and non-software science/engineering related. A Waterfall-like process is probably a good fit here since failure is far more costly than project budget/time overruns. Also, didn't the Apollo guidance computer suffer several failures? ;)

To me, software looks like the least-difficult part of the space program. Doesn't mean it's easy. But let's not overstate its importance.

Also, most developers aren't working on mission-critical stuff. I think it's fair to apply the 80/20 rule here.

> Some of them can actually scan you or your friend's internal organs to see if they're alright too - that's not going to be php on a lamp stack. I'm guessing they are probably not moving fast and breaking things either.

Funny you should bring up medical equipment. Recently, a laser caught fire inside a friend-of-a-friend during a bronchoscopy. Had to put him in an induced coma (Happy ending: he pulled through).

Just out of curiosity, does anyone here think there's anything inherit to either mainstream process (Agile, Waterfall) that puts direct controls in place to prevent complexity? Both talk about "Managing complexity" but very little on mitigating complexity. To me and prevention and elimination complexity is something our profession still struggles with.
"We don't worry about people reselling equipment because we don't hire thieves."

It's very hard to scale that. It's easy when you have 5 or 10 people, all of whose incentives are aligned, but its much harder when you have many more.

My point, though, gets back to a general sense of wastefulness. In my experience, people who are wasteful in one area tend to be wasteful or not particularly rigorous elsewhere.
Hedge funds (and anyone) can make money regardless of the direction the market moves, or even if the market doesn't move. So why would they do something risky, illegal, and difficult that has the potential for unbounded losses?
If you believe that, I encourage you to start your own bitcoin clone, and take in at least half of all mined coins. (Or just put money in current standard bitcoins.)
There's approximately a zero percent chance that this appellate ruling will be upheld.
Yes. Just imagine a world dominated by city-states.
No.

I think we all know the answer to the question but hope for something magical to intercede and steer Twitter the right way, but obviously this is never going to happen.

They're going to grow the site into a platform instead of just a service with a payments/microtransaction system.

I kinda hate myself for liking Steve Ballmer as a CEO more than Costolo, but there it is.
But with unbounded risk.

(I looked at the options chains for ZNGA. Doesn't seem like there is much activity, perhaps because everyone now expects the stock to tank.)
I live in one of the better parts of STL and a woman was killed only 4 blocks from my apartment a few weeks ago. It's definitely becoming more and more of a problem here.
"However, I also know that someone's looking at the receipts I submit & that knowledge has kept me from being wasteful. I'd imagine that the vending machine tracking motivates similarly."

Now, if they presented a bill to each employee with each item they've taken, then I'd agree that the vending machine tracking is similar.
This came out a few years back on NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?_r...
"The person that, by their presence in the transaction, is stigmatizing frivolous requests costs money too."

That person also keeps up with the latest technologies and, ideally, would be able to advise on the appropriate type of keyboard or mouse or whatever.

"You are also conveniently forgetting the cost of somebody who did accidentally spill coffee on their keyboard."

If the spilt coffee results in keyboard damage, no qualm there. I'm referring to cases where you have a slight drop and decide to get a new keyboard rather than wiping it.

" I can certainly say that having them doesn't make Zynga a bad company."

I don't think the vending machine by itself impugns a company but it certainly matches a sense of wastefulness from other anecdotes.
"I don't widely support what you're saying, but I've already said it."
It should really be marked 'unflag' though
Every one of those things should be in a dropdown box next to the "comment" link on a story. Then you could just register yourself as being in one of those buckets instead of posting a message which says as much. It would save time and maybe even reduce the comments to those which don't fall into one of those categories.

Well, I can dream...
Yes that is true in some sense, but with options its far more likely that your money will disappear (the options will expire worthless) than with shorts (the price would have to double for that to happen)
12 sounds that take you back to the 80s